h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I dont remember a show ever saying but isn't Warp Factor 1 the speed of light? Can you justify in layman's terms why we cant travel faster than light.

I believe that is a misconception. Warp factor 1 will allow the crew to traverse interstellar distances in days, not years. Not that Star trek units are worth arguing about.

As for your question about light speed, I cannot answer that yet. I am still grappling with this issue myself. Unfortunately, most scientists don't know either, so you can't just up and ask one.

You can't travel faster than light because of e equals m c squared. As you get faster, your kinetic energy increases, and so your mass increases also. As your mass increases, it takes more and more energy to shift your growing inertia into faster motion. Ultimately it would take an infinite amount of energy to hit the speed of light.

I know but that still doesn't mean we can't.

Well, there's Alcubierre warp drive, which could if not used with great care push planets out of its way or form accidental black holes all over the place, or there are wormholes, which appear to have a nasty habit of collapsing if disturbed by a stray photon.

Wormholes are probably the more realistic of the two options, but I still think we'll be travelling at sublight for the foreseeable future, probably on colonized comets.

Thanks. as payment I'll direct you to Si. You can find him from the complexity theory guide entry. BTW Si stand for Silicon.

Ok, here's something that might help. Taken from the Star Trek - The Next Generation Technical Manual.

Warp 1 is the speed of light. Warp 2 is twice the speed of light. Warp 4 is about 24 times the speed of light. Warp 7 is about 374,064 times the speed of light. This causes many plot oversights. For example, in 'Samaritan Snare', Picard and Wesley take a shuttle to Starbase 224(I think). It takes them six hours. Bear in mind that Picard needs a vital operation on his artificial heart. The fatal mistake of mentioning the distance is made. At the distance given, it would take the Enterprise about 32 seconds to get to the starbase.

Credit goes to Phil Farrand, author of the Nitpicker's Guides to Star Trek. He goes through every episode of every series of Star Trek searching for mistakes. As yet, there are no episodes with no mistakes - The Enemy came close, but in the second Guide to TNG, he was swamped with mail concerning reader-nits.

Have you seen Galaxy Quest Baldrick. I suggest you do then GET A LIFE. I enjoy Star Trek immensely, but I can work out that it's fiction.

I have a perfectly fine life, thankyou very much. It just happens to include picking the series to bits. No I haven't seen Galaxy Quest and I want to.

Baldrick.

Apologies for being rude.

Have you heard of the "Buttered Cat" space ship with "Tomato Sauce" drive? The principals are very simple:

If you drop a piece of buttered toast, it always lands butter side down.
If you drop a cat, it always lands paws down.

Therefor, if you butter a cat's back and drop it, it will hover just above the floor, unable to fall one way or the other.
All you have to do, is build a space ship and cover it in buttered cats, and it will defy gravity.

If you now cover the outside in freshly laundered, crisply pressed starched white shirts, and spray tomato sauce out the front, the shirts will attemt to catch the sauce up at an almost infinate speed. I believe this was the previous design to the infinate improbability drive.

There you have it, the Buttered Cat ship, with Tomato Sauce drive.

ROTFAPMPL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The pleasure was all yours!